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Reflections on English: Shared Futures 2017

Tuesday, July 11, 2017

In the Civic Centre in Newcastle, where English Shared Futures was based, there's an enormous model of the city. It's a utopian panorama of planning: logical lines of highways, smooth boxes of buildings, aspirational glass structures rising at the centre. At the level of the streets there is no traffic, no litter, no congested crowds. It's an adaptable analogy for this enormous, 600-delegate, 100-panel strong conference surveying the field of English literature, language and creative writing.

On the ground of our universities, life feels tough. We are mired in a traffic jam of overwork, while the radio plays a shock jock conspiracy theory about REF and TEF, the employability of arts and humanities graduates, and the returns on their tuition fees. Underlying it all is a permanent anxiety about the value of being paid to read books (if you're lucky enough to be a permanent academic), and the literal value of your next pay cheque (if you're one of the precariat).

English Shared Futures was a chance to rise above this day-to-day existence, and to take a panoramic overview of the discipline as a whole. From this perspective, the virtues of what we do are clearer; while there were certainly panels diagnosing the challenges facing early career scholars or the difficulties of convincing government of the virtues of English, the overwhelming feeling of the conference was one of celebration and confidence.

English Shared Futures made me reflect that although we may grumble when we're required to justify the value of our research and to show how the established discipline of English engages with the brave new digital and economic world around us, we've actually adapted very well to this new landscape - at least if the panels I went to (which were only a fraction of what was on offer, and admittedly skewed towards digital humanities stuff) were anything to go by. Among other things I discovered:

how Romantic poetry and travel writing is being mapped and represented in innovative ways that allow the public to look afresh at the landscape around them, and scholars to look afresh at familiar canon

that when English literature, language and creative writing work together, they enable a regional audience to take pride both in their literary heritage, and in the creative force of their own accents and dialects

Our discipline goes under the label of English and has its origins in a nineteenth-century vision of the virtues of literature as a civilising force. But just as a city evolves beyond the planner's capacity to contain or model it, so in 2017 'English' has developed along all sorts of unexpected routes, absorbing other fields and disciplinary territories along the way. We do some remarkable and diverse things, and we continue to contribute to the society that houses and pays for us.

Huge thanks to all the organisers, helpers, speakers and coffee-break conversationalists for helping me - and judging by twitter many others as well - to recover this more utopian perspective.